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And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer
if it cared to listen and to speak:
"It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn
in silence just as I myself am silent and make no habit of
talking. And what is your lesson? This; that whatsoever comes
into being is my is my vision, seen in my silence, the vision
that belongs to my character who, sprung from vision, am
vision-loving and create vision by the vision-seeing faculty
within me. The mathematicians from their vision draw their
figures: but I draw nothing: I gaze and the figures of the
material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation.
As with my Mother (the All-Soul] and the Beings that begot me so
it is with me: they are born of a Contemplation and my birth is
from them, not by their Act but by their Being; they are the
loftier Reason-Principles, they contemplate themselves and I am
born."
Now what does this tell us?
It tells: that what we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a
yet earlier Soul of more powerful life; that it possesses,
therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself; that it has no
tendency upward nor even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in
its own Essence; that, in this immutability accompanied by what
may be called Self-Consciousness, it possesses- within the
measure of its possibility- a knowledge of the realm of
subsequent things perceived in virtue of that understanding and
consciousness; and, achieving thus a resplendent and delicious
spectacle, has no further aim.
Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of "understanding"
or "perception" in the Nature-Principle, this is not in the full
sense applicable to other beings; we are applying to sleep a word
borrowed from the wake.
For the Vision on which Nature broods, inactive, is a
self-intuition, a spectacle laid before it by virtue of its
unaccompanied self-concentration and by the fact that in itself
it belongs to the order of intuition. It is a Vision silent but
somewhat blurred, for there exists another a clearer of which
Nature is the image: hence all that Nature produces is weak; the
weaker act of intuition produces the weaker object.
In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of
contemplation, find in action their trace of vision and of
reason: their spiritual feebleness unfits them for contemplation;
they are left with a void, because they cannot adequately seize
the vision; yet they long for it; they are hurried into action as
their way to the vision which they cannot attain by intellection.
They act from the desire of seeing their action, and of making it
visible and sensible to others when the result shall prove fairly
well equal to the plan. Everywhere, doing and making will be
found to be either an attenuation or a complement of
vision-attenuation if the doer was aiming only at the thing done;
complement if he is to possess something nobler to gaze upon than
the mere work produced.
Given the power to contemplate the Authentic, who would run, of
choice, after its image?
The relation of action to contemplation is indicated in the way
duller children, inapt to study and speculation, take to crafts
and manual labour.
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